Chinese police say 28 killed in hunt for Xinjiang group

The Xinjiang regional authorities’s Tianshan net portal reported on November 20 in that the suspects have been killed throughout a 56-day manhunt after a knife attack at the Sogan colliery in Aksu on September 18 in that killed 11 civilians & 5 cops.

Xinjiang, which is home to the mostly Muslim Uygur people and Han Chinese, has seen hundreds of people killed in violence across the region in the past, which is blamed by Beijing on separatists and extremists.

The reports say that a total of 10,000 people were involved, including, the photos seem to suggest, a kind of people’s militia, armed with sticks and clubs.

Radio Free Asia said that report likely referred to the operation to find the suspects in the coal mine attack.

“After 56 days of continuous fighting, Xinjiang destroyed a violent terrorist gang directly under the command of a foreign extremist group”.

Special forces deployed to fight the “terrorists”.

“It’s long past time for Beijing to stop monopolizing the reporting on terrorism and its counterterrorism efforts”, Maya Wang, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, wrote in an email. That has drawn criticism that Beijing keeps control of the narrative to serve its agenda in the region, which is rife with ethnic conflict between members of the Muslim Uighur minority and the country’s Han majority.

But overseas experts doubt the strength of the groups and their links to global terrorism, with some saying China exaggerates the threat to justify tough security measures in the resource-rich region.

US-funded Radio Free Asia, which first reported the incident about two months ago, said at least 50 people had died.

“In 2008, members of the group began watching videos containing messages of religious extremism, gradually reinforcing their extreme beliefs”, the statement said.

Pictures accompanying the Chinese state-run media reports showed black-clad forces with automatic weapons traversing rivers, searching through rocky mountain crevasses and camping in desolated areas while conducting the manhunt.

“Members of this foreign extremist group transmitted orders to the gang many times and demanded pledges of loyalty”, it said, without elaborating.

“It doesn’t matter whether the terrorists are domestic or sent to China from overseas, it doesn’t matter what methods they use or where they hide, they will be resolutely and completely exterminated”, the newspaper said, quoting Xinjiang police.